Make up Your Mind Control: 33.3 Ways to Read EYES WIDE SHUT

 

"In regards to the title of this film, Eyes Wide Shut is said to be a code phrase used by members of high society that translates roughly into --- you have not seen any of my misdeeds, because your eyes are wide shut. This allows such people to run amok above and beyond all laws, and without the threat of ever being caught. We see this happen time and time again in our lives, where if one of us broke the law, we would be dealt with in a prompt manner. However, we see on the news and read in the newspapers and news magazines, where globalist figures are constantly walking away from serious crimes without so much as a slap on the wrist. - The Kentroversy Papers 

"At the opening party at Victor Ziegler’s house, Alice Harford meets up with and dances with a Hungarian man. The name of this character is Sandor Szavost. This character shares his name with the creator of the Church of Satan, Anton Sandor LaVey. This would be an accurate analogy, as members of the global elite are all dedicated to either Lucifer or Satan. Their religion has them believe that both Lucifer and Satan are good, and the God of the Christians has forsaken these so-called fallen angels, and is therefore, an enemy God. This type of thinking is extremely twisted, and represents what some have called a Satanic Reversal --- evil is good, lies are truth, death is life, and darkness is light." --The Kentroversy Papers

"It may also be significant that the film's director Stanley Kubrick died suddenly. Mozart, a mason, died soon after revealing masonic mysteries in his opera, The Magic Flute. Author Stephen Knight, whose book,Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1975) revealed Victorian London's Whitechapel Murders as the work of ritual masonic killers, also died mysteriously. And William Morgan, author of Freemasonry Exposed(1836) was kidnapped and allegedly murdered by masons. -- Uri Dowbenko (Steamshovel Press) 

"During his dark night of the soul, Dr. Bill travels through the seamy underworld of his disturbed psyche, searching for sexual release, haunted by some insatiable hunger driving him toward unknown ends, along the way encountering a woman he hardly knows, who swears she's madly in love with him. Add to this collection an HIV positive prostitute, as well as the daughter of the aforementioned costume shop owner--who's apparently being pimped out by papa--and what we have is a trinity of lost souls, caught up in the grinding wheels of a powerful machine that eats people up, then spits them out in tiny, fragmented pieces. All of these woman could easily be Monarch victims, and even if they aren't, each is a prisoner of a system of control prevalent in our society; a system which exists on many levels, and in all strata of society, both seen and unseen."--The Konformist

"According to "Treee," a young Las Vegas woman who claims to have contacts inside the secretive club [The Bohemian Grove], a ritual sacrifice of Mary Magdalene takes place Tuesday July 21; and the ritual sacrifice of Jesus Christ takes place Wednesday, July 22. A human body or effigy is burned in front of an large owl symbolizing Moloch, the pagan Canaanite God...

If having our world leaders belong to a satanic cult weren't bad enough, the Las Vegas woman says the Illuminati are actually an alien reptilian species that occupies human bodies and feeds off our energy....

She says: This reptilian species is called "Sangerians;" they are a "fourth dimension race" and make up 3% of the world's population. She claims to have met "more than one, more than once." They have three-hearts, shift shapes, are cold blooded, but are developing human feelings from devouring human flesh and blood. -- Henry Makow

"The reptilian-illuminati hybrids are obsessed with sexual aggression and domination, which is evidenced by their sex magic rituals. Humans are routinely taken and programmed to serve them as familiars and sex slaves; more evidence of their desire to control and "own" others. 

Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is probably an accurate representation of what takes place in one of these rituals. He was certainly involved with some of their circles and must have been exposed to things like this on more than a few occasions.

As a side note, he was apparently killed because he refused to cut a scene which contained subliminal triggers that were intended to break the mind-control programs of the people in the audience. Following his death, the scene was cut and never made it to the final film." ( -Carleee (Prison Planet Forum)

And so it goes, ever deeper and more perverse... I was going to just keep quoting for this whole post, let the paranoia mine its own irony, but the sinking feeling in my poor stomach was too much. Because, you see, I am easily traumatized, and this shit gets disturbing... Trauma-based conditioning? Torturing children to create multiple personalities?

I believe the above craziness is true without necessarily being real. Keeping my sanity and peace of mind requires me to dismiss most of it as collective subconscious complexes--automatically generated recovered memories of sleep paralysis-- but the way my lower chakras spin like frightened tops when reading it means there's more going on than just schizophrenic hallucinating.

So how can it be one and not the other, you ask, real but not true, or was it vice versa? Pay attention to my ambiguous wording. There will be a quiz. In fact this is it:

HYPOTHESIS: You drop a jam jar on the linoleum floor of your kitchen. It breaks. Jam flies all over the floor. You sweep up the glass, scrub the floor but the jam is still there; you wind up cleaning the whole house, scrubbing top to bottom, and still see the jam, though hazy now is still there -  floating like a ghost imprint over the sparkling floor.

QUESTION: Is the jam 'really' there? (show your work)

The ghost jam is a dried Macbeth-bedamned spot etching its Rorschach butterfly way across the linoleum lining of your subconscious' ceiling. The ceiling of the subconscious (the basement) is the same as the conscious (kitchen) floor, therefore the jam never left. It was spilled on the floor but also in the mind that saw the spill. As there is no true accident, the jam was spilled on the subconscious ceiling first. The conscious floor spill is only a reflection. Is the tell-tale heart really still beating just because Poe's narrator hears it? It is his own heart reflecting a guilty conscience, but isn't his heart also his victim's? We are all connected, therefore the only sane answer is.

ANSWER: The only jam that 'is' is the jam seen, 'there' in the 'real' of the kitchen is an illusion. The truth is the spill. It has always been the spill.
 ----
We can apply this same answer to our tendency to believe in Satanic conspiracies. The 'recovered memories', are like the ghost jam, or the tell-tale heart. They point to a zone that horror authors have been parking in for centuries, but which Freud and Jung never compared enough notes to find on the map --the collective subconscious. Freud had his personal subconscious (the repository of forbidden libidinal desires and traumatic memories) and Jung had his collective unconscious (ruled by its own ego of opposite gender to our consciousness, the anima/animus) but Freud didn't buy the collective much, and Jung didn't go in for the sordid limits of the subconscious. Neither thought there could be a collective subconscious. Why would there be? How could there be a mass repository for all the dark repressed Oedipal fantasies of the individual, all coalesced into a collective real place - where one might see people they know - dressed in robes and doing very dirty things? And then those same people would remember them on the street the next day, or pretend not to, because to admit you were there breaks the code.

I believe all paranormal recollections under hypnosis tend to be true but not real at least not in the limited way we currently define reality. I believe in a collective subconscious, which is located in the fourth hypothetical dimension referred to in the quote above.

I am learning how to be a good adept in navigating this fourth dimension, or does that just mean I sleep a lot? To me it's like the collective multiverse is a phone book of infinite thickness and our world at this moment in time is one chapter, but sometimes other worlds find their way in, laying atop or below us like layers of a Photoshop file. Most of the time it's all pretty copacetic -- the personal subconscious is a vile basement of repressed and banned emotions and thoughts, but it's your own basement, no one else sees it. The collective is more about symbols, sages, shadows and initiations, the shared myths and codes, rather than a private basement it's a shared tunnel network, and the entirety of the ocean and the sky, connected. Compared to it we're just a fleeting cloud or mild earthquake tremor.

BUT the collective subconscious is completely different, as you might imagine - a consensual basement - meaning ogres from other people's repressed personal dark desires can tunnel into yours and come lumbering up the stairs to abduct you. The recovered memories of Satanic rituals in hypnotized children or victims of ritual abuse are 'seen' through the third eye, the same eye we dream with, but the mind cannot distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined. Maybe we don't remember our dreams for the same reason we repress painful memories, and we need to externalize this mechanism, hence the idea of pervasive CIA mind control experiments being responsible for our amnesia. It's not that I don't believe such experiments happened, it's just that I believe they were like a lot of things in the 60s, i.e. the results were too uneven to count as a success so they gave it up in the 80s - I could be wrong, but what's the point of being right? I can't do anything about it. And it makes my skin crawl. In fact it makes me so upset I have to question its validity just to not succumb to heartbreak and panic attack.

The conspiracy theory of MK Ultra-Illuminati started long before Kubrick, the CIA, the Masons, or the Annunaki. And it reached a 20th century full flower in the Satanic panic of the early 1980s, where, like we did back in Salem, we ignored lack of physical evidence and let a bunch of disoriented children accuse their parents, nannies, teachers, daycare workers, and neighbors of witchy ritual. Until it became obvious that there was no logical way some of this stuff could have actually happened, the fear and mob mentality and (my guess) deep-seated sexual repression all cauldroned up to activate the collective subconscious. After all, these kids (in both Salem and the 80's) had no visible marks or scars and according to their hypnotic regression testimony they'd had limbs removed, given birth to tiny winged serpents, and spent a longer time in the coven then they'd been alive, and so forth:

Recovered memories of early sexual trauma, satanic ritual reconstructions, and the development of multiple personalities satisfy the wish of both patient and therapist to understand a bewildering array of symptoms that plead cautious study. Until the 1970s, multiple personalities were considered extremely rare. Although almost entirely absent from the European and Japanese literature, more cases of multiple personality have been described in the past five years than collectively in the past hundreds of years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has not found one single case of satanic cult ritual burial remains, although tens of thousands of individuals every year are purported to have been victims. - JAMA (1995 abstract, Making Monsters: False Memory, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria)

The hypnotists were getting at a truth, so were the Salem judges maybe, but it was a truth unrelated to any physical reality. It was a truth related to the subconscious of a developing child's mind, where everything dirty and only half-understood from adult coded conversations and stray X-rated imagery is translated into ornate fantasies of dominance and subjugation built up larger and more terrifyingly bizarre with every session. Some of the less grisly of these reports of abuses resembled my own prepubescent fantasies involving girls from my class in elementary school and some of the cast of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, but scrambled, like all America's most twisted suppressed dark desires from childhood were still floating around in the ether, ready to be received like radio stations direct through the unconscious mouth into the headline-grabbing hypnotist's tape recorder.

I didn't really understand it until I read Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld which points out the science vs. religion vs. occult arguments are all failing to encompass the way our perceptions change the perceived:

As with all anomalous entities, the very act of observing the particles disturbs them. Observer and observed, subject and object, cannot finally be distinguished. Particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up. If we didn't know better, we might almost say that they had been imagined into existence. The so-called New Physicists smelled a rat long ago. They began to compare the whole enterprise to oriental religion or to suspect that its reality is primarily metaphorical, not literal and factual. This is not to say that daimons cannot manifest concretely, as we have seen. In fact, the smaller they are, the more powerful they can be, viz. the atom bomb. (more)

Harpur also points out the similarity of Satanic child abduction to the indigenous tribal initiation practices through the centuries, practices we would consider barbaric and illegal today. But these ancient tribes understood the importance of trauma in enabling the symbolic death of the child and his rebirth as an adult. Note the astonishing similarities that in the tribal ceremonies Harpur describes below with the recovered memories of children that led to the Satanic panic (as well as the Salem trials):

 They are snatched from the safety of their homes in the dead of night by tall entities with extraordinary faces --slit mouths and noses, large eyes, for example -- and carried off to a dark place, sometimes narrow and subterranean like a grave, where they are left for days at a time. Deprived of food, exhausted, they are periodically visited by the entities, who torture them, slashing their penises and scarring their faces. At the same time they are given amazing knowledge --secrets they must not reveal -- before being returned to their villages in a blaze of lights where their families no longer recognize them. (231)

Harpur writes that the children kind of know what's going on -- that this is all an initiation -- but are still terrified beyond all measure, not only of death but of the now confirmed suspicion that their parents and relatives have been transformed into demons:  "The children themselves are painted to look like ghosts... for their former childish selves have to die through the initiation before they can be reborn into new adult selves." (231)

It would explain a lot if we took this into account alongside the sole non-PG remnant of the tribal initiation rite in our modern age--the losing of one's virginity -- to explain the sordid sexual nature of the Satanic panic and mind control sex slave EYES WIDE SHUT mythos.

It might seem like I'm saying this stuff doesn't exist.  The tribal initiation, the paranoid schizophrenic fantasy, the Salem Sabbath, and the the Illuminati mind control conspiracy are of course all part of the same phenomena --the collective subconscious --but I don't think it's 'bunk' or 'made up' entirely. There is a vast wilderness beyond what our ego allows as 'reality' (a term the ego doesn't even like to examine, as like HAL 9000, it refuses to see itself as it truly is --a fantasy).

Seeing ROOM 237 last week (review here) is what set me off on this tangent. If you see that film you naturally have to see THE SHINING right afterwards, and then keep going, applying the paranoid deconstructions from 237 to his other films. But I warn you, keep out of EYES WIDE SHUT with your ray of paranoid layer uncovering! Just stay out! A few luridly detailed mind control theories and recovered memories in and you might be wishing you could put the genie back into the bottle.

I don't know why I was so shocked by all that SRA (Satanic Ritual Abduction) business. Reproduction is a nasty brutish business, even without the Illuminati stealing all the hot women, and the idea that mind control frequencies in TV broadcasts turn girls super slutty if you give the right code word ("Tiffany's! Cartier!"). Such stuff I'm sure has happened here or there and it might be a comfort to the broke, lazy slob in his easy chair seething with resentment that his wife isn't Victoria's Secret level hot to know some day he'll be rich enough to buy a hot hypnotized girl's programmed love. Me, I poison myself with straight white male liberal hatred against my darker sexual self until I feel literally sick because no matter how cleanly feminist I think I am, there's another layer of self-awareness  under that wherein I realize it's all an act, dating back to my virgin middle school days, wherein I deludedly believed my sensitive new age guy routine would enable me to get girls into bed rather than just as friends.

If the sensitive shoulder to cry on gambit ever worked it didn't work long, and my soul began to itch for freedom to let Mr. Hyde free. By the time I unearth that layer and lay foundation for a deeper level of sensitive self awareness and wise up to my six foot deep playa tricks ("the best agent is the one who doesn't even know he's an agent," said Bill's insectoid typewriter), the girl I'm trying to win or impress is off having children with a stable husband. Naturally I think she did all that just to spite me. And that kind of solipsistic paranoia seems to me at the heart of some of this Satanic recall. Just read a ton of stuff on the Monarch MK-Ultra conspiracies out there and then watch TV, any TV show or movie, and you can feel the truth of it.

For example, as I'm writing this, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM, with an automaton girl standing before a series of mirrors (which I've learned they use in mind programming), singing that she's under a spell--an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including occurring before an assembled audience of mysterious attendees, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked in a class we forgot to study for, etc.). In reproducing the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, the programmers tap into the control state, programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend. I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference.

Staged (with audience) Programming (note raised hands), from top: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 
Clockwork Orange, Manchurian Candidate

And it's a rabbit hole we're hardwired as children to be attracted to... scared to go in, yet unable to look away. Part of this is our secret masochistic projection, Freud's "a child is being beaten" rubric or modern thriller cinema's obsession with abducted children-- the proxy agony of the hypothetical abductee, the way Cruise's cocky doctor uses the image of the wife being ravished by the naval officer--an image to something which she admits up front is only a fantasy--as a tool for paroxysms of masochistic acting out that would make even Josef Von Sternberg go "whoa, bro."

The naval officer theme is no accident, appearing as it does in the dream 'cover memory' in ROSEMARY'S BABY and equating the ocean with the military industrial complex - the dream captain, the "master" of the ocean surface as the subconscious to the unconscious' deep waters. Cruise's doctor might explore the feminine depth, but always with a glum matron present, always with sterile gloves. The navy man goes in deep because he is master of the ocean! He needs no matron present (except naked, in the shadows, chanting)

Row Row Row! (from top: Eyes Wide Shut, Rosemary's Baby - dream sequences)

In the end, if for no other reason, imagining all the hotties in the world are mind controlled sex zombies for the rich and powerful is an ingeniously masochistic tool to explain why you can't have one. And for that and other reasons it makes no difference if it is real or just the subject's subconscious id's favorite childhood bondage scenario remembered as real through hypnosis. In other words, even if true it is still a paranoid fantasy!

As per Lacan (as analyzed by Zizek):

"Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews "really are" is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice." (Looking Awry, p. 71)

Translated to the Illuminati codexing of EYES WIDE SHUT, the only truth is that we need to project our latent masochistic perversity onto hypothetical figures who freely practice what we won't even allow ourselves to fantasize about. If these projections are real it is only because these dark fantasies, which we are not even conscious of, structure the fantasmatic dimension of our social order.

If we could prove these evil secret networks did exist, with names named and figures arrested and tortured confession, it would merely be a hum-drum scandal once the public interest moved on, and the worlds of paranoid schizophrenia, narcissism, etc. would be without their dark support structures. If you know any people with these conditions, maybe you have heard them talk about ex-boyfriends breaking into their apartments while they're at work, moving objects around, planting microphones in their teeth, sending strange numeric codes at the bottom of seemingly random SPAM emails. They can sound very very sane and convincing, and you may even believe them when they're in your room having coffee, but as soon as they leave, you snap out of their spell and roll your eyes. As per the above Zizek quote, even if these things are really happening, that eye roll has just kept you from being dragged down into their pathology. The idea is to not believe it but at the same time to not deny its possible truth, for the more we try to scoff at or downgrade these experiences the more we drift into the role of witch hunting moral crusaders, in other words -the more we believe it the more true it becomes, the more our reality needs it to be true to flourish.

Missing the Orgy

Part of the paranoia of all this which I really resonate with is the feeling of being left out of something. Somewhere, somehow I'm missing the orgy. I remember circa 1989 up in Syracuse, being super sick with a fever and trying to sleep in my girlfriend's apartment while she was painting in the other room (she had no roommates). As I lay there in my deliria I became sure that she was cheating on me and in fact had another man over at the exact moment I was in her bed, and that she was cheating on me with him; I could hear them laughing. I would stagger into the other room to confront her, but she'd be alone, not even on the phone, not even the stereo on. Then I would go back to bed and begin to 'know' deep in my gut that the guy was hiding under the bed. I checked and the closet was empty so I became sure he was in the closet. I checked. I checked under the bed again. It didn't matter I found no man (the apartment was very small and easily searched) because I knew he was there. I was ready to start a massive fight over it because I was sure he, or they, were hiding, mocking me, from every shadow. The moment I closed the door I heard my girlfriend begin to laugh quietly and him whispering. I whipped open the door, nothing. Even knowing I was just having feverish delusions didn't help.

At any rate, it proved a valuable experience for me in later life. When I later saw RAGING BULL I knew why he was so psychotically jealous of his wife: head trauma.

We can see the end result of this delusional fantasy in the case of Richard McCaslin, Who "planned a heavily armed assault on the exclusive (and alleged site of sadistic Illuminati-reptilian Satanic abuses and human sacrifices) Bohemian Grove men's club for more than a year," believing "it would take something dramatic" to draw attention to human sacrifices he feared were being held there":

"In a jailhouse interview Monday night, the well-spoken, lucid and clean-shaven man said he "wanted to make a point" and was prepared to kill people at the Monte Rio resort if necessary. 

McCaslin said he thinks he is sane. 

"They might beg to differ," he said with a laugh, pointing his thumb behind him into the mental health ward." --- The Press Democrat (1-22-02)

Was Kubrick the filmmaker version of McCaslin, confused by the mix of suppressed subconscious fantasizing, exclusion anxiety, and "somewhere a child is being sacrificed" or "Somewhere my love lies sleeping (with a male chorus)" neurosis?

OR was he initiated into the weird world of mind control and sex ritual due to his being hired to fake the moon landings? Did this dark secret prove such a burden to him, not being able to tell anyone, that he finally snapped and told his wife, who was pretty freaked out, mirroring Bill's late inning confession to Alice? And that's why they killed him? Is everything in EYES WIDE aspects of Kubrick's attempts to come to terms with realizing his own wife was also a victim of mind control?

OR did Kubrick just read a lot about it in those 'recalled repressed childhood Satanic abuse trauma' and MK-ULTRA books and eventually it warped his mind?

OR is this all just an isolated neurotic's stilted conception of how rich oversexed people behave at parties?

The case of McCaslin and my own fever jealousy should illustrate by now that there is no real difference, the answer to all these questions is yes.

Part 33.3: Antahkarana Kadabra!

The weird irrational behavior of the two models in the opening party, for example, along with everything else that goes on, can be explained through the maze of the mind control theory, as they want to take him "over the rainbow," presumably a well-known code for the world that is shown to subjects of the practice, leaving them a way to explain all the bizarre things that seem to happening to them, THE WIZARD OF OZ being one of the source texts for this kind of conditioning:

"The Rainbow--with its seven colors has long had an occult significance of being a great spiritual hypnotic device. Constance Cumbey, in her book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, which exposes the New Age Occult Movement, correctly writes, "The Rainbow (also called the Antahkarana [left] or Rainbow Bridge) (...) is used as a hypnotic device (p.261). 

"The Supreme Council of the 33rd" of Freemasonry has used the rainbow on the cover of their magazine. In a book teaching Druidism (as in Illuminati Druidism), The 21 Lessons of Meryln, the Rainbow is described as "A true sign of Magic...it exists in both worlds at once!" Elvira Gulch is a woman who owns 1/2 of the county where Dorothy lives in Kansas. She is shown later in the Land of Oz transformed as a witch.

Many of the Illuminati elite are rich and lead double lives. People who meet them at a ritual will see the dark side of these rich people. At the rituals, people are tranced from drugs, chanting, and mind control; they are "over the rainbow." - Fort Refuge

On the other hand, the two girls may be there to just set up the future problem between Bill and Alice, whose mutual attractiveness has surely caught them the attention of interested parties before, but like the single night of misadventure that opens A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, their marriage seems to begin at this party. (No one from Alex's violent misdeeds prior to the home invasion night gets revenge, for example.)

The figure who separates Bill and Alice originally, Nick Nightingale, has a name that symbolizes sleep (we always fall asleep alone no matter who is in our bed), and immediately after Bill is called away, Alice is hit on by her animus-representation, the Anton La Vey, and soon thereafter Bill gets drawn into a menage a trois any man would melt in his bones for. Now, in my book any good looking young couple is going to want to mingle and flirt and bask in the adoration of others at a party, and then they go home together and no harm done. What, are they supposed to just canoodle all night? Why even go to the party if not to strut? So why are they so cowed and confused by this attention they're receiving? Why does Alice seem to change into a different person, very coy, tranced out, and strange, the minute Anton approaches? Why are these girls so bizarre? Is that illuminated star by the door some psychic trigger to release their inhibitions, or is this just what really really good expensive champagne does?

In the end there's a weird symbiosis between the masked orgy Bill crashes and Alice's dream and the idea that Alice is actually the girl who dies (or 'has her brains fucked out' to use Sidney Pollack's vile terminology), begging the question: what is worse, a sex-saturated dream where you lose control and are violated every which way but which you are enjoying (she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a sexual reality in which you are out of your depth?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I hadn't read Lacan then, and couldn't stand the fact that Bill's uncertain fog lets these two hotties slip away, and all the subsequent ones he loses, or even got them in the first place, or was so easily picked up the West Village streetwalker. I mean this isn't Atlantic City! But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time, like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems.

Here's a detail I remember about those two girls who tried to pick me up but gave me a whopping panic attack instead (and this after I 'tested' my psychic powers by requesting in my deep meditation to pick up not one but two girls for a menage a trois that night)-- one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for her 'costume.' OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy in EYES hide human faces. Are reptile contact lenses on Halloween the perfect cover, allowing reptilian-human hybrids to show their real selves?

Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering a run in or two with another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually open for my prudish tastes, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these two sets of girls looks like now, except that they were very sexy, and seemed possessed with eerie calm. If I did hook up with either set, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange for my chickening out of these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes?

My roommate Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it....then again he's not a writer. One of them came onto me at an outdoor concert while I was tweaking out on way too much LSD and my dog acted all afraid of her and her beauty carved into me like talons; I could feel the emanating waves of open sexuality calling to me but I could see my mortal death as well. I heard myself muttering an incoherent apology and felt my legs carrying me away even as a part of me tried to take up her offer.

Plus, Bill getting called away before he can go 'over the rainbow' to deal with the OD seems to be implying those two girls meant shooting him up as well as whatever sexual stuff... and he may have wound up as comatose as she is. Even metaphorically it means he is spared the problems that plague a man beset upon by two hot women, a kind of all-encompassing panic-inducing mix of dread and desire that confound his ability to walk or think clearly (the awkward nervous banalities of their conversation reflects this kind of flushed disorientation). It is like a drug in and of itself, draining normal humdrum reality, the way, for example the music dies down and changes and the rest of the world becomes a blur when Maria and Tony's first spot one another in WEST SIDE STORY.

What's in that champagne?

Hey, so naturally fitting in with my life experience I read EYES as a metaphor for addiction and recovery. The name Dr. Bill is even a hybrid of Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson, the founders of AA. And that 'program' as they call it can get very cult-like, despite the founders' best attempts. The drug downstairs at the party is champagne but they all act like they're on heavy duty opiates, or maybe expensive champagne is just so expensively good it acts as a moral inhibition quasher.

Even so, I've never seen anyone act as bizarrely as they do at that EYES opening party, except at gatherings of sexy friends where everyone was drunk and super high on ecstasy and/or roofies. Did someone tell Kubrick that people at parties talk super close (because of loud music) and act weird on ecstasy, so this is what he was going for? Maybe he should have actually gone to a few parties. That's the problem with all these cultish mind control readings: maybe they're true but their behavior is also very close to the ideas of what a person who has already missed all the orgies would imagine orgies are like, someone like a doctor, who always has to keep his mind relatively clear in case there's an emergency call.

To get back to Lacan, there doesn't even need to be an orgy going on to feel you're missing the orgy. But miss it too much and you might come crashing in armed to the teeth like our poor friend McCaslin, shocked to fine an empty grove instead of the full-swing Sodom that was causing you so much unbearable Freudian anxiety!

Awake, sleeper, from the dream of Cruiselessness

But if that's what he desires to depict then Kubrick messes up again, because upstairs the comatose hooker Mandy looks nowhere near pale or blue enough to be believably OD-ed. Her skin glows. Bill does a good job of 'reaching' her through her head in a way that might mirror deprogramming, though: "Mandy, Mandy, are you in there. Can you hear me? Move your head if you can hear me..." shining a light in her eye, you can feel almost what it's like to be lying down hearing him far above you as you die, and maybe that is a parallel with Scientology's work with addicts, but when he says, "you can't keep doing this... you're gonna need some rehab" it's a joke. How does he know? She could easily be just dozing off from too much of that roofie champagne. Probably she won't need rehab for the very reason that her tolerance is way way down otherwise she wouldn't have passed out so early in the evening. Maybe she got the good stuff at this party and it's usually cut with B-12 so she overdid it and passed out for a hot second. She should just tone it down and keep her tolerance way low by under rather than overdosing. And she needs to stay the hell away from Ziegler and has super-potent supply. He's like that producer whose underage girlfriends keep OD-ing in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Ding!

The next scene, their post-party clinch to "Baby did a bad bad thing" by Chris Isaak, seems a little shady, too.. The joint rolling is cool but then Alice goes back to talking in that close druggy whisper and you're like damn girl, you ever talk normal, like a normal person? Did Stanley make you take roofies all during the shoot? Was Rohypnol your cough drop? Did he stress you guys out so much that roofies were your only escapes? I've done my share of Rohypnol and let me tell you, on the right dose you don't pass out (if only you take a half like you're supposed to), rather you float around on winged angel Roombas and talk real close to people, in a whirl of abandonment and inhibition-free jouissance.

But to take the paranoid conspiracy theories quoted at the top to their inevitable conclusion, all sexual openness and ecstasy is a product of hypnotic mind control, or Rohypnol-spiked champagne. And that's sad. I believe there is mind control behind desire, but it's not Satanists or the CIA or the Illuminati at work. Power is enough of an aphrodesiac, they don't need to get all drastic to have chicks swoon for them, No, the culprit behind all this is far more evil than any inner circle of hooded power brokers, and more serpentine and twisted than any 4th dimensional reptoid.

Of course I'm referring to DNA.

Call it alien programming, if you like.... why not? Our DNA after all wouldn't have survived this long had it not liked to inspire us to throw condoms to the wind. The genes that survive through millennia are ruthless in their goals. They can make you think not using condoms just this once is going to make it sexier, and keeping the baby is nobler, and that your lover is "the one" you should raise a family with forever, and ever, and ever. But that's before you climax and plant the seed. Once you've dropped off the goods, that drive now tells you to split. Hahaha that voice wants you to be a tomcat whore when ten minutes ago it was preaching at you like the mufhuggin' Bishop of Canterbury. Sucker! The genetic con job is the oldest trick in the book. We're like the tip of the iceberg thinking it's moving of its own free will when all the while the bulk of it is below the surface being drawn hither and yon on murky currents. Thinking you can really ever know how deep below the waves you go is, in the end, the very definition, in the end, of "fucking" madness...

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"These Bad Boys Mean Business" - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN Vs. FACING EVIL with Candice DeLong

 The real life Clarice Starling, Candice DeLong (above) was a high profile FBI profiler for 20 years. Seeing her on Investigative Discovery's Deadly Women and Facing Evil (Friday nights!) is to see a still button-cute but steely-eyed brunette whose brittle but compassionate demeanor is tried and tested in the forge of evil, poring over testimony and evidence and motives of specifically (for the shows) homicidal women. Interviewing them on Facing Evil in a style as intimate as a Barbara Walters, Delong guides their story from childhood to the moment the trigger is pulled or knife inserted; the moment sanity is left behind. Before that moment they were just normal people  but once the first shot is fired or cut is made, their whole world--and that of their victim--has now forever changed. So here they are, in jail for life. And it's all because they let a man (almost always) blur their own private line between good and evil.

Facing Evil

Their stories follow a general similarity of a vulnerable woman and a predatory, usually older schemer. On the surface, this undeniable facet of our modern mediated life validates some of the feminist concerns about the Twilight series --that it glamorizes abusive relationships, encourages dependence on older men and encourages leaving conventional reality behind for the fascist bubble that love and submission create.

In this fourth in the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward tells a story of his days hunting and drinking the blood of 'molesters.' A flashback to a screening of Bride of Frankenstein (1933) cements him to a lineage that dates back to the first Universal horror films, the dawn of dread in cinema, implying that his kind are in a sense, truly evil in that they are predatory. Whether they curb their habits, only drink bad guys (like Dexter), or only hunt deer, they're still evil -- maybe that's the true difference between staying out of jail in civilization and survival in the wilderness. Predatory instincts ensure the latter, but the sharper they are the harder it must be not to kill everyone around you, sooner or later, just because you do it so well.

A romantic fantasy demon lover like Edward in the Twilight series and a real life murderer are, based on this tenet, indistinguishable. Like sending love letters to Richard Ramirez or Ted Bundy--the thrill of bad boy danger tempered by the impossibility of their release--the saga of Bella and Edward is similarly based on thrills and danger welded to 'safety' and denial: there's no nagging wife to dispose of first, but there are... other things... that make their story conflate with the prison nurse who shot a guard to help her bad boy escape, over which comes DeLong's memorable words (approx.) about the nurse's love for hot prison guys: "You liked the bad boys. But these bad boys mean business."

I love the first three Twilight films (well, let's just say, I'm 'fascinated' by them) but Breaking Dawn is a huge let-down, like what might happen if Ramirez finally got out of jail to marry one of his pen pals, and he turned out to be old and bald and fat and safe. The problems with Breaking Dawn aren't those, but herewith are summed up in the three M's: Maturity, Martyrdom, and Music, and the one saving grace, Disillusionment:

1. Music: Instead of the nearly nonstop flow of emotional sadcore songs that ran like a nightmare chorus through the first three films we get a lot of listless minor key piano that occasionally breaks for tired croons from Christina Perri and Bruno Mars. Blechh. Part of what drew me to the first three films was, in fact, the sad music which actually seemed to be what Bella Swan the character would actually listen to while moping around in her bedroom. When the pop songs finally sneak into this fourth installment they all sound the same--lots of flat male neo-folk harmonies-- and lack any kind of legitimate sadness, except in the most perfunctory of Urban Outfitters Americana hipster harmony kind of way.

 2. Maturity: Whenever a teen series moves into a big marriage or out of high school you know you're headed for trouble and that's why I maybe forgive Dawn a little bit more than I forgave, say, season four of Buffy. The theater I saw Dawn in was freezing cold (broken heater) and that made the extended, strange marriage ceremony both better and worse: time slowed, half the ceiling was dripping and exposed, presumably from a burst pipe; the cherry blossoms onscreen seemed made of ice, and the dream of the 'death-size' wedding cake froze my blood, literally. For a second I had a sense of overwhelming fear that Bella was already dead and marrying Edward be like the scary climax of Psychomania!

The intervening year/s since the last film have been kind to Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner: posture and facial feature definition and a sense of gravitas are theirs by right. Pattinson meanwhile just seems extra bleached and CGI washed out until he looks a bit like he's being airbrushed, like Courtney Cox in Scream IV.

Still, in general they have all avoided the pasty hungover look that dogged the aging Harry Potter gang, and I loved the awesome selection of fully sketched-out 'relatives' of the Cullen clan, all gorgeous and interesting and probably worthy of spin-off films. Checking out those glowing eyes and Goth-but not too Goth- dresses made me desperately want to be at that wedding, and made me think I already had in weird teenage dreams I still remember fondly. PS - My favorite Cullen is the nurturing but still badass 'older sister/advisor' psychic vampire, Alice, played by Ashley Greene. But of course, I'm not alone in that.

Break: If you're still unclear why/how this series is so popular, let's examine the still below:

Note the purple and violet color coordination that's been the key luscious art design since the first film, and the way these two cute vampires fuss, with their centuries of beauty tip expertise, over this 18 year-old slacker with her hunched over posture and vaguely mannish profile. As a viewer you're identification locus moves in three directions if you study the picture, mirroring the three components of consciousness:

   1) Bella: cute but frail and human, easily-led (ego)
   2) Vampire helpers: examining our human weakness from their superior position (super ego)
   3) The Gaze / mirroring / metatextual subjective position : the unborn child's free-floating ghost, eying Bela's womb like a tired wanderer eyes a warm, toasty Motel 6 (id)

In a sense, it's perfect just as it is, this preparations for the wedding. There's nowhere to go but down. After a certain point no amount of stalling and pretty baubles and nice scenery will help when it's down to you, it all comes down / to you / in your nakedness; facing the end point of desire's long trip down the river Niagara, when the three aspects of consciousness are forced to face the three unconscious aspects, the sides of self you never even knew were there, the ones hiding at the bottom of the lake, evil sea wolves!

3. Disillusionment: That said, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) shows up and steals the film halfway through the wedding reception, bursting with lycanthropic life, sweeping Bella off her feet and right away from the paler-than-the-wedding-cake groom. Jacob's derisive scoffing that her and Edward's honeymoon will be a sad sick joke-- his incredulity that Edward 'hasn't told her yet,' --implies some massive sterile impotence on the part of all vampires that makes the 'waiting til they're married to have sex' aspect suddenly seem like a sad con job. Once that ring is on her finger, the fact that this Ken doll has only a plastic absence in his pants will no longer be something she can protest about.


Sure enough, after this long beautiful wedding scene and lengthy travelogue to this exotic secret honeymoon location we in the audience are as as jet-lagged as Bella (and frozen to death in an unheated cineplex). We'd been expecting some serious fireworks, and instead Edward drags her down to the middle of nowhere, just to be by the beach, and feebly tries to humiliate her because she's not mad enough at him for leaving her bruised up from the roughness of his, how you say? lovemaking? Ah yesss. In the film's best scene she looks down at him while he sits on the smashed up marital bed, not a gentlemen of vamping anymore but a self-sabotaging undead toad, a loser with weird teeth who's spent three films postponing this inevitable de-pantsing because he is, 'ow you say? A fraud, like all Kens!

 Thus we come to the realization that those people who wait to get married before fucking are perhaps either terrified they'll be terrible at it or else completely oblivious to the tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis and/or Buddhism. Having sex before marriage is like getting your head out of the clouds and into the dust and grime of who's turn it is to do the dishes; the longer you stay in the virgin white clouds the more you're sink fills up until the dishes are so dirty and so numerous that you can't even find the sink, or the soap... and you run from that sink, don't you, Bella? But now you're chained to it!

So while Bella and Edward's flatline honeymoon is not what we want to see it's what needs to be seen for the film to have a larger meaning than just button-nosed girl promise ring erotica. Rather than giving us the trite softcore displays of conspicuous enjoyment we only think we want to see and which would, in the Lacanian sense, collapse both Bella's and our own identification construct, they give us the truth, the awareness, the realization that the whole grand mythic aspect of their love would be lost if a happy-ever-after truly arrived. As long as she's miserable we can still safely identify with Bella and enjoy her squirming from our hidden masochistic perspective. Once she's 'well laid' as it were, she becomes no longer our misery-loving company but a threat to our enjoyment.

 A key moment is at the Rio airport where Edward makes arrangements with a Brazilian pilot for a private jet home because she's pregnant... with a demon baby! The impression Edward creates as such a hip, rich, happenin' dude in his cargo shorts (he can speak fluent Portuguese!) is denuded by the nonplussed way Bella regards the whole thing from her passenger window in the nearby cab. By now, Edward's brand of 'I'll take care of everything' is recognized by her, finally, as mollycoddling. His Victorian/compulsive need to keep her co-dependent is based more on his own insecurity and self-loathing than on any truly chivalrous impulse. So, like the women interviewed by Candice DeLong in Facing Evil, Bella is waking up out of a brainwash by a bad boy.

The thing is, the real time-serving inmates interviewed by Candice are 'made' into killers through this same brainwashing technique. And Bella technically will let Edward make her into a killer (a vampire) but she has chosen it in advance of all his brainwashing; she is drawn to the darkness, and her bad boy actually tries to keep her out of it. It's not the sex of the honeymoon she really wants, for without death, what do you have? Sans petite mort? Vous n'avez rien!

4) Martyrdom - Bela indirectly uses martyrdom--the oppressed feminine's ultimate trump card-- to force Edward into finally letting her become the undead wraith she's always longed to be; like Steel Magnolias in reverse! The only way to get Edward to finally turn her, to 'kill her,' is via the pretext of a pro-life sacrifice, rather than a personal and morbid self interest. Of course it's annoying that this all has to be in service of a pro-life subtext, but, if you follow the 3rd wave feminism all the way down to the twisted roots you'll see it drinking heavily from the abject underground stream of pregnancy and rough sex--the twin magnets of darkness no amount of feminist rationale can brighten.

So let me ask you this: If a woman starts out independent and chooses to be overwhelmed by the male other  is she betraying her gender, even if its by her own choice? Is she allowed to examine the paradox of being free through surrender? Is she allowed to choose a deeper darkness than even death or prison can contain?

Steel survivor: Won't get fooled again.

Accusations of Twilight being pro-life as a whole are evaded by Edward being so pro-abortion, hating his own semi-dead child (as opposed to the doofus husband from Steel Magnolias for whom his wife seems little more than a baby wrapper). Meanwhile Bela's refusal to give up her half-vamp infant even as it's killing her is seen as foolhardy by everyone but herself... and part of it isn't just her connection with the child but her wish to die and be reborn as a vampire, which Edward would clearly postpone indefinitely (naturally since once she's turned he will lose his power over her). In other words, her choice is based on her own desire to die, and her connection to her baby, sans any desire to please or obey her man's selfish edicts. So in the end, feminists and pro-choice types alike go snarling back to the Exit of this film, both ill-served by the myth they cautiously hoped to adopt. And those of us who seek genuine subversion recognize it in this very sly Antigone-like renouncement.

It is, after all, only a myth...

But... that's not quite right. Something can be 'only' life, but never 'only' a myth. The danger of ignoring the true nature of the mythic archetypal unconscious--of presuming the mythic dimension has no power other than cheap entertainment--is that you leave your unconscious with  no avenue of conscious expression, so it festers in your pressure cooker subconscious until it explodes in sudden violence or bad boy brainwash submission.

 This is a sad, Freudian truth seen all too well through the steel blue eyes of Candice DeLong on Facing Evil. Without an archetypal context by which to recognize the big bad wolf when it came pawing up at her basket, the Red Riding Hoods DeLong interviews were easy prey. Maybe they never learned to read, or their dads were fundamentalist zealots who refused to let them hear the story (Red Riding Hood shouldn't be allowed out without a male escort, and the hood should cover her whole face like a burkah!), and now they've paid the price. Haters can sneer at it, feminists can rear back and bare fangs, but girls currently immersed in the Twilight world will all grow up knowing how to recognize wolves when they see them. The bad boys they meet will just seem 'sooo fifth grade', only slightly less outre than ponies, or those phallus-free Ken dolls.

But those who don't have a wolf to chase them in their youth can never grow out of the need for one, the wild-eyed deer in  the headlights longing the bad boy wolves can spot from a mile off at any bus depot. Instead of knowing a devil when they see one they are instead themselves are only seen, and sucked... first through lupine head trips, then into murder, then through Candice DeLong's steely blue vampire eyes and back out into the hell paved by Christendom's good intentions.

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Alice Part 2.2: The Looking Glass Dolls

The once innocent figure of Alice grows warped by time's fun house looking glass to become a token of phallic empowerment coupled to amnesia as embodied by the lovely Milla Jovovich in the RESIDENT EVIL series. Regularly waking up in a strange shower and working her way past sterile booby traps down poisoned Raccoon (City) holes, Alice's wonderland is a video game version of hell - nonstop threats and very little love. From a mythic standpoint, Milla's Alice trades in coy innocence for guns and high kicks. She deals with undead monsters AND a corrupt post-apocalyptic government, and death not ends it. She is both fully mature and unborn, sexy but essentially genderless - mired in the quicksand of shifting animus relations, doomed to spend the rest of her life wrestling with the sticky shreds of her cocoon, a dream from which one awakens only into another level of the same endless game.

We can see the reverse of this stagnation in the mama's boy phenomenon, the PSYCHO Norman Bates unable to sever the hydra-like apron strings of a domineering mother. While the girls with bad animus relations may simultaneously revere and fear their fathers, the boys simultaneously resent and "represent" their mothers.In order to blast loose the Self from this repressive quagmire of unassimilated archetypal energies, some real force is required. Death--real or symbolic--is often not even a viable solution. But the egocide of acid works, baby: you don't have to die, just let go of your gun and submit to an alien frisking, with looove.

'Twas the psychedelic drug explosion of the late 1960s that first caused a drastic and much needed push in this direction. Women were shown a different way forward than just copying or condemning men, or buying into their narrow view of what constituted ladylike behavior. When the scholars, artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers got a hold of LSD, the whole pop culture burst at the seams, adding a revisionist slant towards like-minded artists of the past - the Marx brothers, Humphrey Bogart, Dali, and of course Lewis Carroll's Alice. The "Go Ask Alices" are indicative of this as bump up a notch as well. Girls who would have aged into light blue/gray beehive hairdos and terrible dress sense became instead goddesses of eternal coolness and debauched vengeance, and/or O.D-ed. But even demonizing drugs opens up a discourse, just talking about altering one's mind has a tendency to alter it, so it makes sense that in the 21st century it's not even polite to talk about why you don't want to talk about it. It's the pink elephant in the room and once you dare to actually behold it, reality itself begins to loosen and slip away. Pretty soon the elephant is right there, bigger than life, getting more tangible by the second, and within minutes you don't even remember a time it wasn't always there; reality bends and folds and now you remember the elephant from when you were four years old and it just came home from safari. Sounds messy and costly in the long run and yes, you do get stomped on, but hey, you got to see an elephant!

Psychedelic drugs have their own animistic shadow in the "gifts" that help the heroine on her mythic journey. Before acid, the mythic jewels bequeathed on Alice by her hippy caterpillar animus figures were mere signifiers. LSD was the white rabbit-shaped booster rocket. Millions made the journey before the door was locked shut by police and bad karma. Now these opportunities are crippled by media-perpetuated fear, urban legends, and draconian drug laws. But for a stretch of time 40 years ago or so, the doors of perception were blasted open. For a nominal fee anyone could buy a round trip into the recesses of their own forests, where boyfriends were revealed to be wolves and woodsmen rolled together, and fathers were revealed to be slackjawed televisual zombies. Lit up in a brilliant flash, the lines dividing light and shadow in the soul vanished and you were free.

One of the places this sense of awakening and possibility really flourished was in the Czech new wave cinema which brought such avant garde weirdness as DAISIES (1970) and VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970). This last is especially fascinating, a truly complex "adult" fairy tale, fragmented through the psycho-sexual looking glass of vampire imagery, straight out of a storybook you remember from childhood that may not have existed in this reality.

A young girl, Valerie, lives in a small Czech town that's being visited by a circus/carnival. While surveying the clowns and jugglers from her window above, Valerie spots a mysterious vampire figure--The "Weasel"--and from then on its a mad masquerade, as he menaces her and vampirizes her grandmother (her mom is--as is usual in fairy tales--absent) and later the Weasel turns out to be Valerie's father, maybe even her son. Meanwhile Valerie's grandmother regresses in age, and there's near-incest galore. Valerie is given a pair of magic earrings that cause her to teleport through time and space.  In one of the most beautiful and bizarre scenes, Valerie is implicated as the devil and fastened to a pole in the center of a bonfire by the hostile townsfolk. Yet she merely smiles down at them in a warm, absolving way, and uses her earrings to vanish at the last possible second. The end finds her walking through what seems to be a post-production picnic orgy, that same enigmatic Mona Lisa smile on Valerie's face, grown now to bewitchingly mythic proportions. At one point she even looks right into the camera and smiles warmly. Anyone, male, female, straight, gay, old, young, is bound to be bewitched by this young actress's preternatural serenity and auburn beauty, causing a vast frisson of potentially impure thoughts mixed with the urge to protect and nurture her already impressive intelligence. We might flip back and forth from good to evil a dozen times as spectators all in that one moment, and she's already seen it happen with her own Weasel father. She's beyond it all; to paraphrase a metaphor from part one, she's already hugged her werewolf. It may not be quite a prince yet, but for the nonce she's just fine with having an attack dog at her side.

The always trenchant Michael Atkinson sums up LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL in a Village Voice article:

Richard Blackburn's long-fabled Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (also 1972, obviously a key year) exists in a suffocating, ur-Southern Gothic nightscape all its own. Unashamedly shoestring, Blackburn's dream odyssey through pubertal agony drips with Freudian syrup, but it's also a fervidly physical film—the midnight back alleys of Old South ghost towns are not places you'll be longing to revisit. More so even than Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead, this mysterious phantasm plays like a visit to the underworld.....

The "unashamedly shoestring" element, as is the case with fellow indie cult hits CARNIVAL OF SOULS and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (both 1968), is part of the creepy affect, the feeling one is adrift in a flea-bitten midnight zone between intentional Brechtian distancing for a post-modern aesthetic arrest and the cheap carny spookshow thrills of schlock. Like all good Alice tales, LEMORA involves a plucky young heroine, Lila (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith). leaving her kindly but clueless preacher guardian in the middle of the night to seek out the wild dangers of her "real" father, a presumed weasel (i.e. gangster werewolf).

The poverty row emptiness gives LEMORA the eerie frisson of a childhood nightmare. Lila's journey begins when she stows away in a car of a sleazy couple to get to town, which turns out to be a few cardboard storefronts in a small, darkly lit, empty soundstage. Rather than making the film laughable, this "unashamedly shoestring" quality adds to the dreamy disconnect - our own dreams have this same cardboard two-dimensionality. All the extras and actors she encounters are grotesque parodies of sexual adults as seen through the eyes of a child, a drunken pair of brawling lovers, a creepy bus ticket cashier, etc. The more cheapjack and surreal it gets, the creepier, the more uncanny.

But the "Alice effect" in LEMORA actually comes not from the usual stock of menacing males, but from the coven-like peer pressure of the older women. Lemora herself is a succubus-type who gets Lila eating raw meat and drinking blood and possibly dabbling in lesbianism--and there's an old hag who sings an eerie nursery rhyme while walking slowly in circles around Lila while she's imprisoned in a shed. There wouldn't be another matriarchy this creepy until Neil La Bute's WICKER MAN remake! And here we realize why:  the Bruckheimer bottom dollar feeders of Hollywood have a frat boy's fear of castration and so there's no powerful women like these in our modern Hollywood myths - only arm candy and maybe a syrupy old grandmom for Peter Parker. And LEMORA has all the things big money boys are still struggling in their inner female's sticky webs to get away from; they'd rather not be reminded, like Jimmy Stewart in VERTIGO, that they're not ever going to escape. Ain't no amount of bullets and bromance gonna change that, Jimmy. You got to let go.

They say the soul of every old man is a young girl, and vice versa, that all the ages and genders ultimately even out in BENJAMIN BUTTON-style criss-crosses, I believe that's so, and when we grow weak and elderly our soul thins out until it's barely born. Old interests return, part of the reason why children and old people get along so well. The key to discovery of self then is the brave meeting with these inner figures of your past and present and shadow; the magnetism between genders and generations is then sublimated into art and myth, not repressed, banned or condemned. Drugs like LSD should be regulated and dispensed gingerly, but never suppressed or demonized. With research and proper set and setting, they could change the world overnight for the better. The real dangers to our future, as LEMORA indicates, are the preachers and moralists and hysterics, the ironic distancers and the ego-blinded. The addictive nature of repression is the real dark power at work in our communities, censoring with violence what it can't control, never admitting to itself that without darkness, light itself becomes dark, to compensate, and bad things happen. The outlawed darkness is forced to become light just to go in there and save the day. Balance--not triumph--is key. That's why John Lennon knew he had to invite the defeated Blue Meanie to come hang out at the end of YELLOW SUBMARINE. Alice would have done the same for you. would you arrest her just for that?

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